Is it really possible to separate emotion and reason?

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All of our thinking is emotively based. Everything we do is emotively based - even math. It is all an instinctive correlation of our experience - to distill down our experiences to what is good or accurate. We feel bad when something is incogruent or does not fit.

In a sense that computer "doing the math" is being emotional. It is looking for the solution sifting its data

Last edited by Mdyar on 01 Aug 2012, 6:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.

No, not all. There is no emotion involved when you gauge a distance, for instance. It is just calculation. Emotion may be present at the same time, you may have decided to gauge the distance based on emotion or instinct, but the actual cognition involved in doing so lacks emotion. What I'm seeing mostly from people who feel this way is a failure to separate different mental activities and just blur the lines between everything, and conclude that all processes are emotional because some of them are.



Computers are not capable of emotion or even intent. It is not "looking for a solution," that is merely an analogy to make it easier to comprehend what it is doing. It has no purpose in mind, no intent, and is no more capable of forming an intent than a rock is. It performs actions and conducts calculations because it has no mechanical ability to do otherwise. To say it has intent is like saying that a roof plans to keep water off or a lightbulb means to illuminate a room. Computers have no agency at all.

I suggest reading this pdf:

http://www.motherjones.com/files/descartes.pdf

Disagreeing with your perspective is not a failure, nor is your mischaracterization of the position I tried to explain in this thread accurate. I am not blurring the lines between anything and I am trying to clarify connections that have been observed through empirical means.

I never mentioned anything about disagreeing with my perspective - what I mentioned was a failure to separate concepts. Is emotion part of logic? Or is logic flawed because it lacks emotion? You claim both. This is a self-contradiction in your position, and it is the result of failing to separate concepts like emotion, thought, logics, etc as distinct. They do not need to be entirely isolated from one another, to be distinct. But they can and are entirely isolated from one another in some instances - such as pure emotion without logic (such as demonstrated frequently by human behaviour), or pure logic without emotion (such as demonstrated by a computer).

The article demonstrates the same error. It claims "rationality should be informed by the emotion and feeling that stem from the very core of us." It makes the distinction and then denies it in the same breath.

A logical train of thought IS informed by emotion, and you will find this every time you examine its initial premises far enough. At the core is some arbitrary value that is informed by emotion. But this core is, naturally, not subject to the process of logic - it merely informs it. How could it be any other way? Logic cannot and does not provide fundamental values and can't provide a starting point. It can be used to analyze and develop ethics, but only when it is provided with arbitrary premises, which are the result of entirely different processes (usually a combination of emotion, instinct, heuristics, and occasionally some development based on logic).

Logic and rationality without emotion is like trying to fly an airplane in a vacuum. It will not fly, it never has been able to. However, this doesn't mean that logic and emotion aren't distinct process, merely because they are usually (but not always) found in tandem. They are quite different processes that do not operate in a similar manner.

The article seems to look at things like belligerent war and economic calculations as if they are not initially informed by emotion and are entirely the result of logical processes. This is simply not true. As you said, it's a garbage in, garbage out process. These things are the products of emotional decisions or value sets, and while logic may be applied towards achieving the desired ends, it did not create the initial decision to undertake any sort of action - that depended on emotion or instinct, whether it be self-preservation, greed, or tribal competition. None of these things are the result of logic, though logic may be applied to achieving any end equally well.

Last edited by edgewaters on 31 Jul 2012, 11:52 pm, edited 3 times in total.

It doesn't disprove what I posted, which are not simply my notions or I would have had no sources to link.

But, if there's no emotion involved in the math, why do you do it? What purpose do you have? How do you provide that purpose without emotion? You haven't demonstrated that, you are simply shifting the goalposts.

I never attempted to demonstrate that - quite the opposite - how many times do I have to say that emotion provides the starting point for all logical processes? I think I'm over a dozen times now.

The process and the motivation are distinct and separate things, not one and the same thing. This is what I mean when I say you are failing to differentiate concepts. Here you make the assumption that because one is emotionally motivated to do math, that math is therefore emotional. It is not. Computers can do math without emotion. The process, and the motivation for doing it, are two completely different things.

I had not realized that science had changed very much. Falsifiability was something that I was taught at school as something that has always been a part of the scientific method. But since science has always relied on experiment I'm not sure how Karl Popper could have changed much. I looked up instrumentalism and scientific realism and I do not understand how anyone could be a scientific realist anymore given how Newtonian mechanics was overturned and how there are still so many open questions in modern physics. I could see how people could have been scientific realists, however, when all of physics was still described classically.

No; Popper introduced it in the 20th century. It's fairly recent, actually. What came before was the inductive approach, which did not demand falsifiability, but merely held that empirical observation of a sufficiently large set could provide probable truths. After X number of examples Z having Y consistenly, inductivism says "good enough, all Z have Y". Falsifiability was revolutionary because it provided a greater degree of certainty than inductivism. Inductivism itself was dreamed up by another scientific philosopher; Hume came up with it (and also noted its problems, but was unable to provide a solution).



I'm with you on that one, I favour instrumentalism or perhaps pragamaticism, but scientific realism is definately winning. I guess people are just unable to accept that the only real knowledge that science can provide is prediction, through models. People short circuit on this one and insist that the models are the reality, as if a map actually is the territory. That's how I see scientific realism. I have no idea how it can be so popular.

You need not use an emotion for the conclusion though, which is where they can separate from one another.

Whether or not it is possible to separate "emotion" from "reason" is an interesting question. Do the words correctly represent distinct parts of the psyche, or are they abstractions, purely for describing aspects of a whole? As far as the human psyche goes, I am inclined towards the latter. The human psyche is a whole entity of inter-working parts, each affecting the others. We have to be careful how we mark these parts, for we run the risk of fragmenting them - cracking them accidentally, making distinctions that are not actually significant - rather than marking them as parts of a contiguous whole.

I do not think the two should be regarded as separate, or even separable. Creativity is prevalent in even the most empirical of minds. Both artists and scientists strive to assimilate human sensory experience in creative, innovative ways. Without the capacity to perceive the new, to follow intuitions, to be inspired, we would not have the great scientific explanations we do today. It's not a matter of allowing one type of thought to operate exclusively - both play in tandem, from among several other aspects, into everything we do. Emotion (as it feeds drive and creativity) is as much a part of human reason as any.

As parts of a whole, I think the question could be: Which is the dominant trait? Which trait dwells within the other's wider domain?

Last edited by abyssquick on 01 Aug 2012, 4:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I think that emotions, when they are not part of the factual content of your thoughts (like when you're doing math) are still involved in your thinking. When I do math, there are always low-key emotions: The desire to see how the problem comes out, the ever-so-slight anxiety that I might get the problem wrong, the pleasure in retrieving ideas and putting them together in a new way; sometimes frustration when I can't see what to do next. These emotions are part of the motivation for why I like to do math. Even the frustration is a driving force because it's so nice to see it relieved.

Right, but they aren't part of the process of the math itself. They are can be present at the same time and they do of course provide the motivation, but if we're talking about the process of a mathematical operation itself, they are not part of it (even though they might be happening at the same time)

But without the emotions, I would most likely not be motivated to do the math. I'd sit there and stare at it. I'd not be curious about what the answer was; I couldn't desire to learn from the problem. I've experienced this during episodes of depression, and it's not pleasant, that tired, dull, uninterested sort of state. (By the way, you might assume depression is an emotion: It isn't; it's a mental illness. Depression can result in very little emotion, and for me, it often does. Without motivation, I often end up doing very little during such episodes.)